Cauldron of the Feminine: A Journey Through Dreams

Cauldron of the Feminine

Copyright © 2020 by Pearl E. Gregor

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law.

Some names have been changed to protect privacy while remaining true to the story.

Tellwell Talent

www.tellwell.ca

ISBN

978-0-2288-1762-8 (Paperback)

978-0-2288-1763-5 (eBook)

Table of Contents

Dreams Along the Way

Book Three

Dedication

Acknowledgements

Section I

Standing Separate

Chapter One Shadows and Light

Chapter Two Ghost Woman

Chapter Three Fear of Light

Chapter Four Turning Point

Chapter Five The Birthing Process: Coming Out

Chapter Six Composing the Quilt

Chapter Seven Miracles and the Goddess Energy

Section II

The Abysmally Slow Rise of My Own Feminine Consciousness

Chapter Eight The Creative Masculine

Chapter Nine The Grotto

Chapter Ten Going Down

Chapter Eleven A Gift of the Soul

Section III

The Loose Thread of the Tapestry

Chapter Twelve Women’s Mysteries Rediscovered

Chapter Thirteen Midpoint of the Cross

Chapter Fourteen Death Precedes Life

Chapter Fifteen Grieving Old Knowledge Is Difficult Work

Chapter Sixteen I Am the Chalice of Life. Drink Deeply from the Chalice of the Ancient Mother.

Chapter Seventeen Picking the Bones

Section IV

Awakening to Integration

Chapter Eighteen The Soul Makes Known its Presence

Chapter Nineteen Birthing Awareness: Personal Mythic Pattern

Chapter Twenty Telling the Story

Chapter Twenty-One Keening and Prayer

Chapter Twenty-Two I Wanted a Miracle While Everything Else Stayed the Same

Chapter Twenty-Three The Restless Crossroad

Chapter Twenty-Four Mysteries 2018

Chapter Twenty-Five Hymn

Appendix: The Descent of Inanna

References

Dream Index I, the Woman, Planted the Tree (Book I)

Dream Index Authoring Self (Book II)

Dream Index Cauldron of the Feminine (Book III)

About the Author

Endnotes

DREAMS ALONG THE WAY

BOOK THREE

Things happen and can be experienced which are inexplicable; …

not everything which happens can be anticipated.

The unexpected and the incredible belong in this world.

Only then is life whole.

For me the world has from the beginning been infinite and ungraspable.

—C.G. Jung

Dedication

To Colin, Elise, Liam, Noah and Ava

Jason, Traci and Beckett

Rachel, Eric, Ethan, Ian and Owen

With much love

Acknowledgements

I acknowledge the many readers and listeners as close as next door and as far away as Poland who have sent notes, reviews and comments to acknowledge their delight in reading I, the Woman, Planted the Tree: A Journey through Dreams to the Feminine and Authoring Self: A Journey through Dreams to the Feminine.

I deeply treasure the dedication of Anne Champagne, copy editor and Michael Kenyon, structural editor. I am grateful for their skills, knowledge, expertise and constant support throughout the two years we worked to complete A Trilogy of Dreams Along the Way.

Cover design and illustrations by Lorraine Shulba www.bluebugstudios.com.

Grateful acknowledgement is made for permission to use the following copyrighted materials:

The History of our Mother’s Dreams by MariJo Moore, Spirit Voices of Bones: Poetry (Asheville, NC: Renegade Planets Publishing, 1997). MariJo Moore (Cherokee/Irish) is an author/poet/anthologist/seer/medium. She resides in the mountains of western North Carolina. marijomoore.com

Descent of Inanna from Lynn Gottlieb, She Who Dwells Within: A Feminist Vision of a Renewed Judaism (New York: HarperCollins, 1995), p. 37.

SECTION I

STANDING SEPARATE

Chapter One

Shadows and Light

… for something good, you have to go down for a long period …

There is a long process going on in the unconscious, as if it is collecting and balancing its forces. If you think of psyche as a self-regulating system, it seems like the energies must be in the right place before something new can emerge.

–Marie-Louise von Franz, The Cat:

A Tale of Feminine Redemption, 1999

The past, filled with patriarchal demands to be accountable, responsible, respectable and silent, nods to the future. I offer my dreams in the belief that we are all connected, so my dreams may resonate with yours. I am just beginning to live my life out loud; that is, in public. I like to think these dreams play a small part in the emergence of feminine consciousness, the coming of the Cosmic Mary.

The decades of struggling with my interwoven and repetitive dream motifs, through new grief, joy, mystery, power and awareness, now, in October 2017, feel like a promise tinged with excitement. The dreams Pushed and Pulled: Joining the Dance, October 17, 1990; Recognizing Feminine Power, March 21, 1991; Worthiness, January 9, 1992; and Negative Fearful Masculine, October 16, 1992, demonstrate changes in my inner feminine energy. I make a major breakthrough toward integration, synthesis and understanding when I pull together and study these dreams.

I sincerely wish I had been much more knowledgeable in 1991. I may have saved myself years of angst. But no, it is apparent I was not ready. Today, in the #MeToo era, as I look around at the fingers of blame pointed at men, I come to understand my own complicity in continuing the status quo. I was too unhealed; too fearful in my inner self. I was animus possessed—that is, unaware of the depth of my own repressed feminine disguised as a man. Now, I work to take my own power. I recommend that every woman, every daughter and every man, every son study the story of The Handless Maiden and let it seep into their bones. You can find it online from Sounds True Publishing or in one of the many editions of Women Who Run With the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estes.

October 18, 1992

I am coming to understand the shadow aspect of dreams and making a few notes from Meeting the Shadow.¹ Jung compared individuation to the alchemical process, one stage of which is melanosis or nigredo when everything turns black inside the vessel containing the alchemical elements. He claimed this was the first contact with the unconscious, the contact with the shadow that calls forth the Self so that the creative centre and the real centre of the personality begin to emerge. Society has a habit of teaching us to put our best foot forward, which may simply be my best possible false self, the one most acceptable to family, friends and countrymen. Beneath my mask, I as an individual have a shadow, personal and cultural; groups, teams and institutions have a cultural shadow. Owning my own shadow means projecting less anger, hatred and dissension toward others. It also means I must dare to declare who I am. I must come to know and accept who I am becoming.

A dream always points to an unconscious situation so that we might integrate the unknown into our lives. Dreams can present us with our own projections, which blur the vision so we see neither ourselves nor the other.

I want to meet my shadow to develop an ongoing relationship with it. Tonight, I reflect on the very first dream in December 1988, The Landing. Here is my descent into the underworld. Indeed, it portended a perilous descent into the unconscious; this is a confrontation with my dark side. Now, I am about to experience the shadow and understand much more deeply than I’ve understood from all my theoretical book learning.

Sunday afternoon at 2:40 I lie down to rest. The wind is blowing hard. I imagine that it blows through me, scattering all my limiting beliefs and ideas that no longer serve my inner growth. I dream but feel as though I am awake.

The Inner Voice

There are a lot of unfamiliar people. We are discussing the possibilities of God creating evil. I move, with several other people, away from the main group and to a hilltop. I say very firmly, There is no way I can ever believe in a God who deliberately, by choice, created evil just to destroy his own creation. I quote Scripture, which I cannot recall when I wake up. A man says that my statements are making the others down below very nervous and he is not sure how they will react. They are afraid. I am concerned for them but not fearful.

The dream clarifies my inner restlessness. I am reading Women and Evil² as well as collected essays on the shadow. The ones below are nervous tells me that my personal unconscious still is full of my early childhood teaching. Unbelievably, I still have some deep fears of an angry, vengeful, wrathful deity. The hilltop symbolizes higher consciousness or Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. My intellectual beliefs have changed drastically. The dream tells me that confusion reigns supreme in my lower unconscious. I am experiencing great difficulty articulating my understanding and deciding how much to share. My ego neither wants to change nor give up control. I must move beyond the shores of silence.

My experiences are very slowly being integrated into consciousness. It is four years since the cellular transformation, when my soul voice began telling me that there is no such thing as an angry, vengeful, out-to-get-me-for-impurity God. I have been gifted with compassion and forgiveness. The problem is to bring strangeness and confusion to consciousness and articulate the threads of thought that are knitting within. It’s like spool knitting when I was little. I pull the threads around and around three tacks. The inner world God-is-love thread stretches but holds steady while the other two threads seesaw back and forth. Look at the work of many like Mother Theresa! Sure, look. But see there the dark underbelly of evil, mass murderers, wars, shrieking televangelists and violence. How to hold the tension? I haven’t a clue. It is three weeks since the Power of the Unconscious workshop on October 3rd when I wrote: I intend to deepen the journey. A series of dreams begins to unfold.

Inner Priest (Part One)

A drunken priest.

All I can recall is a drunken priest.

I think perhaps my Inner Priest isn’t as healthy as he could be. He and I don’t seem in accord on my need for comm-union. The maternal embrace of Mother-Church may be strangling me or … creating inner uncertainty or … perhaps I’m too dependent on Dad. The institutional church presents a struggle; the Eucharistic Church—the body and blood of Christ—feeds my soul. The Eucharist is my entrance into the energy of the healing universe.

Dark Convent (Part Two)

There are several brick buildings. One, St. Mary’s, I am happy to hear will be reopened as a girls’ boarding school where I will be able to study. The second of four red brick buildings, it’s covered with blue and white striped boards. The stripes run horizontally. I go inside where there is light but no light.

Laurel is there. She says something and begins to weep violently. She puts her head in my lap. As she cries, I realize she is crying over childhood wounds. She gets up, goes out through black metal doors but I can see through the bars of the metal. She is wiping her face. I tell her she could write in her journal of these experiences. The writing is to be done alone. She rejects this vehemently. Then I will become an introvert, like my father.

Would that be so bad? I ask. Perhaps the introvert in you wants out after all these years. There are 16 personality types. Surely being who you are isn’t all that bad. You should go write this all down. Don’t be afraid to write how you really feel. Swear and scream in your writing if you want.

For the first time I see her face clearly. Snot runs from her nose, down her face. Her features are thin, her hair dark and wild, her aquiline nose almost transparent. She leaves and as I go out the door, I realize she has left through a different way onto an outside balcony. To my right, I open large double oak doors into a darkened staircase and onto a large foyer. Dimly I can see two sets of banisters. If I walk down the steps, there is an oak handrail fastened to the wall with black hooks, and if I sit and slide down step by step there is also a handrail. Both are on my right. Laurel has gone out to my left. I sit and cautiously go down the flight of stairs to the bottom. I hear a faint voice calling. It seems someone wants to use the same stairs but is afraid of the dark. I open the door to leave. I must go and change into my skirt as jeans are not allowed in convent classes.

I am now running carefully across a wrought-iron swinging walkway, enclosed by wrought-iron sidings like a swinging bridge. I tilt the swinging bridge and note with satisfaction that I can tilt it even again, balance it. I run down this next set of stairs searching now for the way out. I push my left hand through swinging metal doors—the back of a batting cage or baseball bullpen. I think I won’t go in that way but continue on past. Somewhere in here I realize I have left my glasses behind where I spoke to Laurel and so I can’t see very clearly. But I decide not to return for them.

The dream is very real and is set in darkness. I think I must phone Laurel to see how she is doing and let her know I am willing to listen to her story. It seems I have encountered some shadowy part of myself I packed away at age 16, a very significant threshold transition to womanhood. Why does the dream choose St. Mary’s? Though I’ve been told I went there, I have absolutely NO memory of that school. Apparently, my brother drove me to the school one morning and I was back at his and Shirley’s apartment in Calgary by lunch.

My violently weeping, hidden self is reluctant to emerge and especially averse to writing her story but the Dark Convent dream image has a story for me.

October 20, 1992

I decide that the dream is telling me I should go into the dark, again, inside the convent walls to find aspects of myself. The convent experience was my retreat to introversion, my escape to solitude and the contemplative life.

One strategy for understanding dreams is to write what you admire and what you dislike about a dream figure. Well, I admire Laurel’s strength, her desire to overcome obstacles and her commitment. We share a common bond through our Crooked Creek heritage. I met her in September 1988 when I joined Alberta Education. A few years later she left on long-term disability due to severe depression, loss of energy and meaning in life. She appeared smiling one Monday morning, sometime in spring 1992, did a little pirouette in my office doorway, saying, Like my new suit?

It’s beautiful! I said. Soft leather in a deep, warm fawn colour that highlighted her beautiful black hair. She immediately sank down in the chair by my desk and began to weep violently. I was stunned.

She and her husband had just returned from a weekend trip to Toronto where they had attended the opera to celebrate their 30th wedding anniversary. She couldn’t understand how it was that the good life with a PhD, healthy family, financial security and a loving husband, could turn to dust so quickly.

Before she left on disability, she came in to tell me she wanted to walk the dog and clean her closets. I had to giggle at the incredible irony of dog, which is often symbolic of healing instinct, and closet as in healing one’s inner world. We had talked of dreams and inner healing. She was skeptical. She associated healing with institutional church and was deeply attached to her Mennonite, heretic grandfather. She had spoken of returning to some church but couldn’t find the right one. She often spoke of making it despite the problems of losing her mother very young, then of having a stepmother who became a bag lady on the streets of Vancouver. Her father, whom she never ever criticized, relied heavily on her. She’d looked after things since he couldn’t, and virtually raised her younger siblings. She spoke dispassionately of being ridiculed and taunted in junior high school because she owned only one outfit, which she laundered each day and mended when necessary. She married very young and with her husband adopted her youngest brother.

When I think about her laundering and mending her own clothing, being a responsible motherless daughter during her young years, I understand better the tears alongside the luxurious and beautiful leather suit.

Now, much, much later, I understand the father complex of we daughters of the patriarchy. Both she and I are liberated, high-achieving daughters ridden with feelings of self-loathing, anxiety, self-ridicule and uncertainty. The difference between us is that my father was strong and supportive while, from the little I gleaned, her father was a weak, aimless, irresponsible man who left the responsibilities of raising his younger children to his very young daughter. Our mothers had been very good friends. Mom gave me pictures of Laurel in her baby carriage and in her mother’s arms. It turned out these were the only pictures she had of her mother or of herself as a baby.

Why does this dream choose this particular woman from my life experiences to portray an aspect of me in this particular dream?

October 21, 1992

John P. Conger writes The Body as Shadow in Meeting the Shadow, where he comments that:

Indeed, the body is the shadow insofar as it contains the tragic history of how the spontaneous surging of life energy is murdered and rejected in a hundred ways until the body becomes a deadened object. The victory of an over rationalized life is promoted at the expense of the more primitive and natural vitality. For those who can read the body, it holds the record of our rejected side, revealing what we dare not speak, expressing our current and past fears. The body as shadow is predominantly the body as character, the body as bound energy that is unrecognized and untapped, unacknowledged and unavailable.³

This is my very first intellectual encounter with the body as memory. I am staggered. No wonder I ache and ache incessantly. The Renovations dream with the dead, brown Christmas tree in the living room makes even more sense. So do the repeated comments of the chiropractor, the kinesiologist, the reiki master and the massage therapist about my nervous system shutting down.

Surfacing Memory

I sit quietly and very still in my living room with the Inner Priest and Dark Convent dreams and my journal. I write as quickly as possible. No edit. No censor.

I am in study hall in Lacombe Girls’ School. My hair is done up in curlers but I have no idea who put the curlers in since Mom always did that at home. My stomach hurts. I am supposed to be studying French and Biology. I am very afraid. What will I do about initiation? I hate the thought. How can I avoid it? I will be laughed at. I hate being laughed at.

After two hours or more at my French and Biology textbooks, I panic anew. I can remember nothing. I can’t even remember where I am. Dread. Fear. Anxiety. Words on a page.

I am away from home surrounded by too many strange people. My head aches. I can’t eat. The smell is fearful. I go in the kitchen and eat cereal late after study hall. The nuns, the teachers and the classrooms scare me. I am overwhelmed by my incredible stupidity. I faint in Mass nearly every morning. Vultures, great black beasts, are tearing at my mind and my body. In the dormitory are small white cots. One girl always wants to borrow my clothes. Her name is the only name I remember: Louise. I want to scream. I don’t. I want to stand on my head, kick my feet on the walls, and scream. I don’t do that either. The dorm sleep area is up some dark brown stairs. The chapel is at the far end of the hall. The dining room, the kitchen: everything is brown. Ugly. Closing over my head. Smothering.

The classrooms are in a separate building. Newer. I remain silent in class. I am tied up. I read the same sentence 10 times. The French teacher, so far, has not called on me. I live in terror of her finding out I cannot speak a word of French. I am unbearably tired. I want to sleep. It is really very simple. Pretty soon they will know how stupid I am.

October 24, 1992

How do I avoid the trap of pride and self-made arrogance? I have a negative inner tape that runs. And runs. And runs some more.

In real life the greenhouse is almost finished. The fall yard work is close to done. There is much promise in the last days of autumn of the coming deep sleep of winter. I love October on the farm. Always I watch the fields. Combines. I grew up in waves of love surrounded by Earth’s beauty. There’s a photograph I must find. I am in the fields with Dad and the combine. I suppose I have brought him his afternoon coffee. Peace indeed.

A Dialogue with My Inner Child

A very useful strategy in deep process work is writing and drawing with the non-dominant hand.⁴ I have many conversations with my inner child these days. It is simple. I write a question with my right hand and answer with my left. It’s the magical child. Tonight, I ask, How can I help you? Can you tell me your name? And she answers:

I am sad and lonely. I am not dumb. I can teach many things. I love colour and music and beautiful things that are yellow. I can teach you to breathe. Just ask me to. I am Elaine. You have forgotten me. I love you. I have been very sad for many years. I want to help. Trust me.

The music soars through a silent house. The constrictions of time and space float away. Buzzing flows strangely from the refrigerator, which is in the possession of some insane mechanic whose major aim is to drive women mad. I sink into the music. Reach out and wrap the buzzing through and through with the sound of fairies dancing silently in space that has disappeared.

I suppose I should set some goals. Write them down and post them on the buzzing refrigerator shot through with insanity. No.

Who am I? I am the lilac tree rooted outside my mother’s house. I am an enormous laurel leaf willow moving gently with soft whispering breezes. Why do I write? To touch my roots. To study my tribe. To know. To deepen my faith. To understand. To heal.

Chapter Two

Ghost Woman

Travelling in the Dark

I am with two male office consultants and an unknown man. I think we are staying in a hotel. We are to be somewhere at 7:30 a.m. An office secretary is there. The driver’s face is dark, tanned—the Hunter. An unknown woman is in the front seat beside him. Isaac and I are in the back.

I go to vote on the Canadian Constitution, my Yes button on my collar. At the polling booth a retired schoolteacher tells me about her niece who has four special-needs students in her class. Instantly, I remember this fragment of the dream from last night. I love how that works. The dream somehow seems to bring to consciousness once again something of my experiences as a 16-year-old, as does the next dream.

Special Needs

I am in a classroom. In a small group at the back are several native boys, ages 9–10. One fellow is teaching the others. I come to the group, ask one lad a question. He doesn’t really answer. The teacher-child says: He’s really mentally retarded, you know and he gives me a You-know-the-type look. The lad he is speaking of says, under his breath, I am NOT mentally retarded. I am astonished at the comment from the teacher-student. Surely he shouldn’t be in charge when he obviously is lacking real knowledge and understanding not to mention compassion. I expect more show of emotion from the young student labelled mentally retarded.

I am reminded of how often I want to say to people, I am NOT stupid when they suggest to me that I must be careful with this mysticism stuff. Watch out, you could be getting into the occult or flirting with evil. There is a part of me that has a real problem with being able to explain how I feel or express the fears I do have. I am looking for a dialogue partner, to explore with and share. But NOT someone to feed my own fears and lack of confidence. Am I the only one with this many questions? No. Impossible. Sincere questions are good. It is the damn answers that cover over so many of my questions. Too damn many clichéd answers without evidence or critical thought drive me nuts. I want to ask questions, not memorize someone else’s answers to someone else’s questions.

It is now almost midnight. Life with family continues regardless of my dreams, work with healing, and angst. Brother Tony called early in the evening. Susan is in hospital with gall stones and will be operated on tomorrow morning. He is going only slightly mad with the four kids and his worry. We chatted about inconsequential things.

November 1, 1992

This latest dream of special needs points to a critical impasse, a major inner shift. Where in my body have I packed my own emotions? I think of the inner child conversation. I am not dumb.

I walk through the pasture and woods today. Wet, glistening autumn colours. Rain. Some snow. The air still except for the excited chatter of birds. Occasionally Rascal bounds past, intent on following the scent of a long-gone coyote. She doesn’t seem to notice her chase leads in circles. Something like this healing journey I am on forever spiralling through strange, vaguely familiar territory. A lone spruce tree stands misshapen, its northern branches shorter than the others.

Everlasting Life

A small spruce tree with one bud sticking out on the top branch. I am concerned for its survival. It too is misshapen, somewhat brown, and bracken appears on its branches. The growth is gangly.

The Special Needs dream returns, but shortened to one small symbol. The first waking thought I have is that the small tree is the beginning of new inner growth, a harbinger of increasing wholeness coming from the dead brown Christmas tree of my 1991 Renovations dream.

Over the intervening years between then and now, I have remembered this dream again and again. I will have to green the entire tree to regain the fullness of my nervous and circulatory systems.

November 4, 1992

Cremation

Act I

I tell the director I have been offered a job-trade with a school jurisdiction. He comes in later asking for details. I am now very worried that the jurisdiction really won’t offer a job and wish I hadn’t told him until all the details were arranged.

Act II

I am at a large gathering of people all involved in various activities. I go to the baseball diamond to join a group but none of the people I want to join are there. I am disappointed and wonder where my friends are.

Act III

I am with some younger people. One man agrees/asks to be changed. I can’t quite figure this all out but we burn him up and somehow we have a big amount of stuff, like wet clay or mud in a wheelbarrow. We wheel it across the front area of our house on the farm. There is no grass; it is an open area where we used to rototill. We lift the wheelbarrow up by the handles from the back and the wet mass of clay-like material, the remains of our friend, slides out onto the ground. Someone suggests we need a marker. We build a sort of monument and place it at one end of the mass of material. The marker seems lifelike and sort of like a person sitting on a high one-legged stool. The thing seemingly adjusts itself and settles onto the stool—one leg firmly on the ground. I can see the muscles in the leg and buttocks firm up, living muscle. I now begin to wonder if the cremation is